


Transformers/Life Is Strange AU idea

by EHC



Series: AU ideas [4]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, I know, but once again my brain wouldn't shut up, kinda dumb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:28:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22077721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EHC/pseuds/EHC
Summary: What if the pickup truck Chloe fixed up at the American Rust was more than just a clunker?
Relationships: Rachel Amber/Chloe Price, others as needed - Relationship
Series: AU ideas [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1596307
Comments: 15
Kudos: 13





	Transformers/Life Is Strange AU idea

**Author's Note:**

> I dedicate this weird-ass AU idea to [simpletextedventure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simpletextadventure/pseuds/simpletextadventure), without whom's art and photo stories, this thing likely wouldn't have gained traction in my head. So, for better or for worse, they're partly to blame for this!

I’ll be perfectly up front: I haven’t watched a single Transformers movie since the 1986 animated feature, _The Transformers: The Movie_ , which I still maintain is the only good Transformers movie to exist (seriously, the art and animation hold up even after 33 years). I refuse to entertain the hot mess that is the Michael Bay travesties, so don’t even try.

However, I did read the Wiki article on the _Bumblebee_ movie and found the following bit about the central character quite interesting:

> teenager Charlie Watson remains traumatized by the death of her father, and resentful of her mother Sally and her new boyfriend Ron. Charlie finds a yellow Volkswagen Beetle in a scrapyard.

And then it goes on with the rest of the movie, which I could care less about.

But what other teenage girl can we think of who’s traumatized by the death of her father, resents her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, and spends time at a junkyard?

Enter Chloe Price, Arcadia Bay’s favorite punk, self-taught grease monkey, and potential ally of the Autobots.

Maybe.

Here’s the thing: simply rehashing the plot of the existing movie is kind of boring. If we wanted the plot of _Bumblebee_ , we’d just watch _Bumblebee_ , after all. So, let’s change things around a bit shall we?

While kicking around the junkyard, Chloe stumbles across a pickup truck in pretty decent shape. She starts tinkering with it to get it running again. She’s a little confused as to some of the parts (she’d never seen an engine quite like this one’s) but after a few weeks, is successful.

Chloe’s nicknamed her truck Long Haul (not a real Autobot name, I just made it up). When asked, she says it just came to her one day but feels it’s appropriate since she’s (and yes, the truck is a she; no, she can’t explain why she knows, she just does) in it for the long haul, just like Chloe.

Rebuilding the truck has given Chloe such a boost of confidence that she's able to break the ice with Blackwell's hottest and most popular girl, Rachel Amber. The two hit it off and start hanging out.

Chloe fucking loves her truck. Sometimes, she swears it actually listens to her. She talks aloud while inside, even when she’s not driving around. It’s comforting.

Chloe and Rachel can be seen regularly cruising around Arcadia Bay in Long Haul. The two commonly talk about their respective family problems in the truck. Chloe promises to help Rachel find her birth mother, Rachel promises her home is always open to Chloe.

One evening, Chloe storms out of her house, pissed off that David's moving in. David, upset at Chloe, follows. Chloe climbs inside her truck and David tries opening the passenger door. It doesn't budge, despite not having any visible locks. When he reaches in through the open window to try grabbing Chloe, the window suddenly slides up and nearly catches his arm. As he stands there, screaming at Chloe, who's protesting that the truck doesn't have power windows, the door flings itself open to brain David in the face. Chloe thinks it's high time to leave and does so.

Uncertain what to do, she travels to Rachel's place, grabs her girlfriend (they're dating now) and tells her what happened. Rachel wonders aloud if Chloe found the truck version of Christine. Chloe doesn't think so, though. Long Haul doesn't feel vindictive, just protective. Chloe spends the night at Rachel's.

Time passes. Rachel asks for Chloe's help in finding her step-mother, who her father is trying to keep from her. Chloe agrees and the pair hunt down Frank Bowers. Once there, they run into Damon Merrick, resident dickhead. He recognizes Rachel and threatens her with a knife, only to get body-checked by Long Haul, who surges forward and pins him to the side of Frank's trailer. Frank's yelling, Damon is screaming, and the truck is revving, though not actually smashing him flat. Chloe gets inspired and grills Damon for info, and wonders how long it'd take to remove a man-shaped dent in the trailer. Damon, freaking out that Chloe's truck is fucking haunted, spills the beans (sorry, Frank). Long Haul lets him go, he runs for the hills, and Frank is sufficiently cowed to not say shit as Chloe and Rachel leave.

The two talk, Rachel now convinced Chloe was telling the truth. She and Chloe thank Long Haul for the help and pat the dash. The truck honks in reply.

Time passes. Rachel attends a party without Chloe. The two are going through a rough patch at the moment. Rachel is drugged and, seemingly drunk, is escorted from the party by one Nathan Prescott. He's about to drive off with her to parts unknown when a pair of high beams blind him. Nathan blasts his horn and leans out of his open window to scream at the driver of the pick up to get the fuck out of his way, when suddenly, the truck STANDS UP?!?!!??! A metallic hand tears off the driver door and Nathan is tossed aside, landing head-first in a dumpster. The creature then reaches further inside and carefully plucks Rachel from Nathan's car. It then transforms back into a truck and drives off, Rachel seatbelted inside.

Rachel wakes up an hour later, inside Long Haul, at the Price residence. She's freaking out since she can't remember a damn thing, and suddenly, Chloe's there, having received a text message to come outside. The two talk, finally, and they begin reconciling while also trying to figure out what the hell happened that evening. Long Haul speaks, scaring the shit out of the pair, but explains what she saw from her perspective. She apologizes for following Rachel to begin with but didn't like the idea of her going to the party all by herself. She missed having Chloe and Rachel together in her cab, and really wanted to help them make up with one another.

The following day (Long Haul insists the two get some sleep before they talk more), Chloe, Rachel, and the transformed Long Haul are at the junkyard, talking. Long Haul explains her memory is Swiss-cheesed and she can't remember much, only that she was sent here on some mission. The details elude her, though. She doesn't even remember her original name so is fine being called Long Haul. She answers that she wasn't able to speak or transform before since the parts that Chloe used to originally fix her up were very incompatible with her systems and it took a long time for her body to finally integrate them. She waves aside Chloe's apology since, if it wasn't for her tinkering in the first place, she'd never gotten operational at all. She's quite fluent in English, though, and possesses a huge knowledge base, having had continuous access to radio, TV, and internet the entire time.

Chloe and Rachel promise to help Long Haul recover her memories and discover her original mission, and also thank her profusely for both, saving Rachel and helping them get back together.

Time passes. Chloe, with tutoring from both Rachel and Long Haul, is accepted back to Blackwell. Though a year behind scholastically, she swears to graduate. Rachel, wanting to be with Chloe, enter's Blackwell's extended senior program to earn college credit and get a kick-start on her post-secondary education. Their relationship is strong.

And then Max shows up.

Max, who's earned a full ride to Blackwell thanks to her photography skills, is a shy, introverted girl with an incredible secret: she can control time in a limited fashion. She's been using this gift to snap some amazing photos, which got her the scholarship in the first place. She manages to miss encountering Rachel and Chloe her first day (they all have different classes) but thanks to a run-in with Nathan (who's been driven quite unstable thanks to his encounter with the truck monster six months previous), finds herself at Blackwell's parking lot, trying to avoid him. Chloe and Rachel wind up helping her, though once they realize who she is, Chloe's anger spikes considerably. She slams the truck to a stop and orders Max to get the fuck out. Except, she can't. The door won't open.

The next thing everyone knows, Long Haul is taking all three to the junkyard. It becomes obvious to Max that Chloe's not the one driving. They reach the junkyard, away from prying eyes, and the three girls all get out. Chloe's anger at Max is blunted when Long Haul transforms right in front of Max, then kneels to look her in the face. Max is dumbfounded but not actually scared. Then, Long Haul speaks.

Max possesses something that triggers a long-forgotten memory in Long Haul. The two converse and Max reveals that while in Seattle, wandering the woods outside her neighborhood to take pictures, she discovered a cavern that seemed recently uncovered. Wandering inside, she found a sliver of metal, no larger than a carpentry nail, that was softly glowing. Touching it gave her a hell of a shock and drained the glow, but ever since then, she had the ability to rewind time. She reaches underneath her shirt and shows she's been wearing the piece of metal as a necklace ever since, as a reminder of her gift.

Long Haul asks and receives permission to touch the metal but nothing happens. She sighs, disappointed, and Max reaches out a comforting hand. _That_ triggers a reaction. Long Haul and Max share each other's memories.

Max had, completely by accident, stumbled across the tiniest fragment of the AllSpark, an ancient artifact of immense power that had been the focal point for a terrible war for its possession. It had been shattered into tens of thousands pieces in a last-ditch effort to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Once the war was over, Long Haul was one of hundreds that had been sent on a recovery mission. She came to this planet to try and locate the piece Max found, but crashed landed and was rendered dormant. She had barely enough energy left to disguise herself before falling into the equivalent of a coma, until Chloe found her and brought her back to operational status.

Chloe and Rachel are elated that Long Haul has now recovered her memories but are nervous. Now that she knows, will she leave them? They'd gotten to become very good friends, after all. Long Haul honestly doesn't know. First off, communicating back to her fellow Autobots isn't possible currently, as the crash land destroyed all of her equipment. Second, her mission was to recover the fragment but now that it's energy has been absorbed by Max, does she have to return with her? That likely isn't possible as Cybertron isn't exactly a friendly environment for organics. And third, how did the energy transfer to Max in the first place? All the lore that Long Haul can remember states that the AllSpark isn't compatible with organic life, though honestly, no one's ever had a chance to test that out. This is a new discovery for Long Haul, one that will require a lot of observation. Decades, perhaps. Can't exactly leave now, not with her mission incomplete, right?

Life goes on. Max reconciles with Chloe, and she and Rachel become best friends, though Max and Long Haul actually become really close first. Sharing each other's memories will do that. They make a really weird trio, the model, the photographer, and the future astrophysicist, but the make it work. Of course, they're not a trio. They're actually a quartet and can commonly be found cruising around with their other friend, Long Haul.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I know what you're thinking: where's the next chapter of Worthy?? It's still coming, I promise! I'm still working on it. It's just, my head hasn't been cooperating with me and I haven't been able to focus on happy thoughts at all. Instead, I found myself delving more into that super-dark AU idea I mentioned [on a Tumblr post a while back](https://ehc-on-ao3.tumblr.com/post/189689996816/disgruntled). But I had to get away from that since, fuck, my mood's been shit enough without working on that. One weird trip to Wikipedia and this crap was born.
> 
> One thing you might be asking for is where's the conflict? I don't know. Like I said at he beginning of the work itself, I haven't watched any of the live-action movies but despite getting info from the Wiki, I didn't want to just rehash any existing movie. This is _Life Is Strange_ and needed to feel like it. Just with an Autobot. So, no huge epic robot-on-robot fights, no space wars, no Cybertron crashing into the planet. That's not the scope I wanted.
> 
> "But without that, it's not much of a Transformers story!" And you'd be right. And so, like some of the other AU ideas I've posted here, I grant full permission for anyone to take this wild idea and run with it. Have fun and make it your own. Go nuts!
> 
> I purposely avoided using Bumblebee because, honestly, there's just not enough room in a 1969 VW Beetle to have copious amounts of sex, which may sound weird, until you realize that a lot of the mental images I had for this story idea as I was writing it out were inspired by simpletextadventure's art. Specifically, [Some Amberpricefield](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16952178), which is decidedly safe, and [for her first time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20516474), which is most certainly **not**. The idea that Chloe and Rachel had hot sex inside Long Haul before the Autobot could actually communicate with either girl amused the shit out of me. And I figure, if Chloe and Rachel decide to start dating Max in this AU, there will very likely be a moment when all three forget themselves and start getting hot and heavy in the truck. But that's okay because in this AU, Long Haul's a lesbian, too.
> 
> I did look for Autobot pickup trucks but not only are there very few, I don't know anything about them and didn't want to ruin an existing character. So, I created an original one instead. I almost used the name Jackknife, which is the name of one of my characters in the _War For Cybertron_ and _Fall of Cybertron_ multiplayer game mode, but that's more for a tractor trailer type character, like Optimus Prime or Ultra Magnus, than a pickup truck. Both are great games, by the way. It might be tricky to find a way to play them nowadays since those games are last gen, but if you do happen to have an XBox 360 or PS3 and like third person shooters with an awesome sci-fi sheen, you can't go wrong.


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